Bandage

Healing Human Flesh: NASA’s New High-Tech Gauze Could Accelerate Wound Recovery

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IN BRIEF
  • NASA’s Technology Transfer Program may have given us the future of wound care with its electroactive polymer which speeds up healing time.
  • NASA continues to fuel scientific progress across many disciplines, continued investment in the sciences will lead to more unexpected technology with untold applications.

FROM SPACESHIPS TO WOUND-HEALING

New technology from NASA’s Technology Transfer Program brings forth a type of polymeric bandage that when electrically charged, assists wounds on human flesh to heal faster.

The material is made of polyvinylidene fluoride, or PVDF, a thermoplastic polymer that can generate an electric charge in response to applied mechanical stress. Creators Mia Siochi and Lisa Scott Carnell, synthesized the bandage using a process called electrospinning, where nano-thin polymeric fibers are created using electric charge. The fabrication method was based on a previous invention of another polymeric material from Langley Research Center.

Siochi and Carnell’s work was initially motivated by applications for morphing aircraft capable of adapting to its environment, but the properties of PVDF that they discovered quickly turned the research into a budding breakthrough for medical use.

A BETTER BANDAGE

PVDF bandages have great potential in healing humans. Naturally, the body’s electric properties generate a voltage across tissues that drive healing cells, called keratinocytes, forward. The application of the electroactive gauze improves this function. What’s more, NASA scientists saw that the electric field of the bandage was activated just by body temperature.

“This method utilizes generated low level electrical stimulation to promote the wound healing process while simultaneously protecting it from infection,” said NASA in a statement.

PVDF bandages could give us a future of an apply-at-home first-aid pad, providing efficient treatment by just pressing the pad onto the skin. People can decrease pricey visits to the doctor’s office. More importantly, immediate attention to wounds would decrease the chance for further complications. The development would be extremely valuable for wounded astronauts in space, military personnel in the field of battle, hospital patients undergoing surgery, and possibly many more.

A new type of bandage will draw out bacteria and speed up healing.

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Australian researchers are developing a new type of nanofibre mesh bandage that attracts bacteria, and will hopefully help to speed up the healing process.

The mesh has already been successfully tested on bacterial colonies and engineered skin models in the lab, and the results suggest that bacteria will choose to move out of a wound and onto the material. In other words, it may be able to help draw infections out of human tissue.

“For most people, wounds heal quickly. But for some people, the repair process gets stuck and so wounds take much longer to heal. This makes them vulnerable to infection,” lead researcher Martina Abrigo, from Swinburne University of Technology, said in a press release.

“We hope this work will lead to smart wound dressings that could prevent infections. Doctors could put a nanomesh dressing on a wound and simply peel it off to get rid of the germs.”

The nanofibre mesh is created using a technique called electrospinning, in which polymer filaments 100 times thinner than a human hair are squeezed out of an electrified nozzle.

The resulting fibre is then coated in compound called allylamine, which Abrigo has found makes a range of different bacteria quickly attach to it.

So far, Abrigo and her team have tested the mesh over the top of films ofStaphylococcus aureus, which is often involved in chronic wound infection, as well as E. coli, and showed that the bacteria quickly transferred onto the fibres.

The researchers have since tested the mesh on tissue-engineered skin models, and although the results have not yet been published, they suggest that the bandage also works on real tissue.

The results have been published in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces and Biointerphases.

The next step will be to test out whether the bandages can have the same effect in real-life wounds, and to find out how much of a difference this has on healing time. If all goes to plan, the material could be incorporated into bandages, which could be a huge benefit to people living in remote areas, or those who have chronic medical conditions, such as diabetes, high cholesterol, severe burns, cancer or AIDS, who are at a higher risk of having their wounds become infected.

And it could help us all heal a little quicker and more painlessly, which is something we’re pretty excited about.